I find it insane to have to wait minutes to see the changes and to iterate.

i did devops between 2015 & 2025 and got used to the cadence of waiting between 15 & 180 minutes for testing/production pipelines to finish vetting the work i submitted to them.

i went back to doing IT last year and setup similar pipelines to update the code base my predecessor left behind and my new boss expressed the same consternation about waiting for your changes to iterate.

i'm thankful for it because it gives me 30-ish minute windows to browse and annoy people on lemmy throughout the day. lol

5 minutes sounds like way too much, unless you mean a fresh compile. But then you shouldn't need to wait that long between changes, since incremental compilation should kick in then.

And like sure you can break shit up into crates to speed up compilation, but to do that you already have to have a design you're happy with and that's stable.

I mean, if you have your modules structured in a tree structure and with proper visibility, then it isn't a particularly big leap to put it into a separate crate. You just move the files, maybe fix some visibility modifiers still, and then a bit of boilerplate to add it to the workspace.

It's only really when you're publishing to crates.io, that you don't particularly want to keep changing the names/scopes of the crates, as they'll stick around on there for the foreseeable future.

Five minutes with build cache? Or from cold build?

With cache, then there's almost certainly something wrong with your computer or project.

Also... you aren't building with --release every time are you?

mold and sccache help a lot with the compile times

I've got a pretty large Rust/Tauri program going. Breaking things into crates help, but if you touch enough bits of common libraries, everything needs to get rebuilt anyway.

I use Makefiles for everything. What I found helps is breaking out the parts that don't change much into separate Make commands (like generating icons, linting, frontend, tests, etc), then leaving "make go" as the simplest inner iteration loop. That way, it's a lot more bearable.

There's also "make build" and "make fullclean." You start one of those and take a long break.

sure you can break shit up into crates to speed up compilation, but to do that you already have to have a design you’re happy with and that’s stable.

Or, you can modularize your architecture before you start implementation...

Do you even write requirements ahead of time, bro?